Memoirs

I'm in a class all about writing the personal essay, a preparation for all my future memoirs. A blog, something I've been keeping for years now, is something of the same. In a blog, the subject is one's self. In school, they teach you NEVER use the singular first person. Never use "I". A good essay is well formulated, with a clear thesis and structure, and it is written in third person. The speaker is not to be mentioned. In this class, we are learning to break these rules. Write about yourself. Write about what you know, because that is what you know best. As Thoreau says in his personal narrative of The Walden, "I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well."
Today, everyone is writing memoirs, or narrating their memoirs to a more qualified writer. Bill Clinton, O.J. Simpson, and Americans eat these up. It is clearly a genre that people are interested in. And just like any work of fiction, it is an art. The thing about writing essays is that one must take facts and events. They take real people and places that they personally experienced in some way, and they use these things to tell a story. The essayist must find a story. When they do, they shape and structure the truth, highlight and exaggerate certain parts, downplay and condense others, to come to an ultimate conclusion or message. Not all of the events may be precisely true, but the feelings and emotions evoked should be, and the truth that lies in all the anecdotal narrative. While many essayists are criticized for this, it is important to remember that. The facts don't have to be true for the story to be true.
Anyway, that doesn't really have much to do with the theme of this blog. I have two things to accomplish this afternoon, write my next personal essay, "On Speculation," and set up the ads for my blog, which I have been battling for awhile now. Apparently, I'm more computer illiterate than I realized.
I guess you could say this entry still applies, because it is an endeavor I might wish to pursue further after college and perhaps during my gap year abroad. And because a gap year could surely give me a lot of material to write memoirs about.
Anyway, because neither the essay that is actually due for class or fiddling with the HTML context of this blog is as appealing as ranting and writing on with no particular structure and a conclusion I am still unaware of, this post was born. There's about a foot of snow on the ground, and there's no way I'm trekking to the gym, or really going outside for any reason. I waited in line for a coveted first floor Ballentine non-Mac computer, and despite not wanting to do my homework, it is here I will sit for the next hour. I suppose that is what this entry is all about, procrastination. If only my essay for class was titled "On procrastination..." I would be on my way.